Believe it or not, professional gaming and entrepreneurship have a lot in common. At least, that’s what Adil tells us.

“Starting a video gaming team isn’t that different from starting a business,” says the ex-pro gamer, who spent his pre-business school years competing in the international gaming circuit. Like a start-up company, a gaming team needs business smarts, talent, and sponsors to make it off the ground. “You have to convince people that you are worthwhile before you’ve actually proven that to anyone. You also have to work hard to recruit people from established places, even though they don’t know who you are yet.”

Adil specialized in the first-person shooter games Halo, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (“the best video game ever created”), and Counter-Strike, to great success. After four years of blasting others into virtual smithereens, Adil followed his childhood dream of starting companies, and got his masters at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, where he met ModCloth CEO Eric Koger! The two become fast friends, and Adil joined the ModCloth team in 2007 as an investor and partner.

As the Head of Experience, Adil focuses on all aspects of the customer experience, both on the site and off. He still plays video games, but “sadly, I suck compared to the gamer I once was!” Even so, we’ll pass on challenging you to a video game duel, Adil!